Grandma (2015) takes you on a trip to abortion
A road movie in 6 acts. But not an ordinary road movie. A diverse, feminist road movie about abortion.
THIS ARTICLE HAS SPOILERS
Elle (Lily Tomlin) is not a conventional grandmother — and not only because she is outspoken and has a tattoo. She is a lesbian, a poet, a free and open minded woman. She has just had a fight with her girlfriend of four months when her granddaughter, Sage (Julia Garner) arrives with second intentions. Sage is pregnant and needs money for an abortion. 630 dollars, to be precise. Sage and her grandma have a little over 8 hours to collect the money somehow. And that’s how they start a small road trip.
Elle speaks openly about abortion, and because of this she is expelled from a cafeteria — she may be bothering and shocking the costumers. In fact, a couple looks at her, disgusted. They are more disgusted to know that an abortion clinic used to exist in that place.
We find Sage’s former boyfriend to be a douchebag. He answers the door while smoking, wearing a blouse with a marijuana leaf and holding a hockey bat. Grandma says the he looks like an armpit. He says he’ll beat grandma’s ass and she, of course, defends herself… with HIS hockey bat.
Another horrible male figure is Karl (Sam Elliott), who was married to Elle 49 years ago. He is still bitter about the ending of his marriage and the fact that Elle, back then, had an abortion. He was willing to give them 500 dollars, but gets mad when he discovers the money is supposed to pay Sage’s abortion and says she’ll go to hell. He doesn’t give the money — because he thought he could control Elle’s body nearly half a century ago, and couldn’t let it go.
Elle speaks briefly about her abortion — made in a basement, by a man who said he went to medical school, something Elle doubts, and she refuses to answer if it hurt. Later, she says to the clinic attendant that her abortion was a nightmare, and it was made during The Dark Ages — a period in reproductive rights history some people want to bring back.
In front of the clinic, there is an angry woman calling the women who enter the abortion clinic ‘sluts’ and saying they’ll go to hell. She is an habitué, since the clinic employees know her by name. What kind of person goes every day to a clinic to try to shovel their beliefs into other people’s mouths, faces and minds? She even brings her daughter with her to spread hate, and the little girl surely does that by punching Elle when she says that the world is bigger than their hate and narrow mindedness.
In the end, they collect most of the money from Sage’s mother, Judy (Marcia Gay Harden). It’s symbolic that almost all the money came from women: 500 dollars from Judy, 80 from Elle’s friends, and 50 from Sage’s boyfriend — money he didn’t give because he wanted, but because Elle punched him.
It’s an unusual family. Elle was married to Violet for 38 years. Judy had Sage through a sperm donor because she was “too busy”. Judy was conceived in a one night stand Elle had with a man. We can’t avoid comparing this crazy grandma with Tomlin’s character Frankie from “Grace and Frankie”. They are both eccentric, supportive and love their unusal families unconditionally.
In a road movie, the leads’ trip is both a metaphor and a narrative resource. The characters change as they go down the road. The finish line of the journey may be the same as the starting point, but the characters will be different. In their journey, Elle and Sage regained Judy’s attention and the three reconnected. Judy also accepted Violet’s death — Violet was her favorite mom — and forgave Elle from mistakes of the past. The easiest way out to the movie, considering the theme, would have been making Sage rethink her abortion and give up. I’m GLAD that it didn’t happen,and the film focused on the relationship between such different women.
Something great about this movie is that, even though it’s made by a man, the film is about women. And women of all ages, skin colors and sexual orientations. We have Laverne Cox as a tattoo artist, Elizabeth Peña, in one of her last film roles, as a friend of Elle’s, and Judy Geeson as Francesca.
Grandma even mentions feminist icons. Elle compares author Bette Friedan, who wrote “The Feminine Mistique” to Toto, the dog from “The Wizard of Oz”, because she pulled the curtain and revealed the truth.
Director and screenwriter Paul Weitz directed some episodes of the series “Mozart in the Jungle” and also two “American Pie” movies — because nobody is perfect. He succeeds in showing how an older woman can be more open-minded and progressive than a young person. More than that, he gives the women the center stage. Because it’s a woman’s body, and only she can make that decision.
